The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
“Quality of service” or “QoS”, as it is sometimes called, has become an important issue in networking. In the context of networking, “QoS” generally refers to a guaranteed throughput level or bandwidth to a customer and is often expressed in bits per second. Different QoS levels are needed in different situations. For example, one QoS level may be required to access a text-based service that provides stock prices over a wireless communications link using a device, such as a cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or laptop computer. Using the same wireless device to access a streaming video service would likely require a higher QoS level, to provide a satisfactory user experience.
One approach for selecting a QoS level is to have devices make the selection based upon the requirements of a selected application. For example, suppose that a user of a device selects an icon associated with a particular service. The device consults configuration data that is stored on the device to determine a QoS for the particular service. The device then requests that a communications session be initiated with a communications link that supports the QoS for the particular service. This is accomplished by the device establishing a Layer-2 configuration.
The selection of a QoS level by the device may also involve processing or applying one or more policies or business rules. For example, a policy may specify that this particular user has certain privileges and therefore is entitled to a high QoS level. As another example, the particular user may have purchased a subscription that entitles the user to a high QoS level, and thus a high bandwidth communications link.
There are significant drawbacks associated with devices selecting a QoS and then establishing a communications link to support the selected QoS. First, the software that selects a communications link is often provided by a different vendor than the vendors who provide the applications, which can cause compatibility problems. Also, the QoSs associated with services may change over time, requiring a change to all devices. Similarly, changes to policies, business rules or subscriptions require that the associated devices be updated to reflect the change. This can be very cumbersome and time consuming and is impractical for a large number of devices.
Based upon the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for managing quality of service in network communications that does not suffer from limitations in prior approaches. There is a particular need for an approach for managing quality of service in network communications that reduces the reliance on quality of service selection intelligence built into devices.